Bill's Bitz

Article #5 - 13 May 2005

A Good Day Gone Bad, Big Time!

Well, since it's been a while since I've “Old Headed” with a good story of my many travels as a Hogger, I
figured it was time to regale you with a tale of twisted proportions. I actually had another story that I
was going to share, but through what can only be labelled as a miracle, I have photo evidence to go along with this month's dive into my storied career. Actually, I have been asked many times by members if I have any photos of when I ran. Unfortunately, I never thought to grab a “shutter box” and snap a few. I always
figured there would be time later in my career to take shots. Who'd a thought? Anyhow, about the miracle.
The other day, my wife was cleaning up around our bed and bent down to pick up a folded piece of paper. She opened it, looked at it, and asked if I knew where it had come from. It was one of the very few photos of my exploits that I actually had. Where it had come from, I do not know - but also, where are the rest of the photos that were with it? Again, I have no idea! Just another of life's little mysteries!

So on with tale of “A Good Day Gone Bad!”

It was a typical Monday for the Toledo Hauler. Yes, the same job that I shared my downhill mayhem with a few months back. I was working a bid in relief engineer's position. I worked Friday and Saturday on the Albany to Eugene transfer train down the then Southern Pacific mainline, followed by Sunday and Monday on the Toledo Hauler, with a Tuesday night stint on the Albany Switcher rounding out my week. I got the best of both worlds on the Sunday-Monday Toledo Hauler program, as Sunday was a short day with a small train both ways and an early quit. Monday was just the opposite, as I would usually have 5 units with all the loaded woodchip cars that were kept at Albany on Sunday until the mill unloaded them on Tuesday. Also,the train back was always a biggy from the glut of empty chippers unloaded that day. Needless to say, things where always interesting.

There was also another fly in the ointment in that the Toledo Hauler had derailed 8 cars on Thursday about 30 miles from the end of the line at Toledo. Due to the remote location of the derailment, the Railroad decided to lay a shoe-fly temporary track alongside the derailed cars, so the MOW and Carhops could take their time re-railing the loaded chip cars. To make the slow order worse, the first car that derailed ran along the ground on the ties and cut up over a quarter mile of railroad ties before things really turfed. So I had a long train,
coupled with a 5mph speed restriction of a quarter mile, as well as a “Walking Speed” slow order over the
shoe-fly track. There's over a half hour of slow orders at that location alone, not to mention the 4 or 5
other short slow orders that always seemed to exist somewhere else on the line.

But I digress.

Our train that day had around 20 loaded chip cars, plus around 15 boxcars loaded with scrap recycled paper, and around 25 cleaned dedicated service empty boxcars for the Georgia Pacific Corrugated Paper mill to load rolls of finished product. It was a hogger's train with all the loads on the head end and the empties on the rear.

We left Albany around 12:30 pm, already a half hour into our shift. The run up the hill to Summit was quite uneventful with the usual “Shop Talk” and anticipation of how the new shoe-fly track was going to like our 3500 foot long beast, also interspersed with a good joke or a bite from the lunchbox followed by a gulp of Cola or coffee or something with caffeine included in the ingredients! We traversed from one station to another with one eye on the Timetable and the other on the clock to see how well our run was going, time wise. We barked our way over Summit and made the usual slow 12mph descent back down to the lower elevations, and then meandered along or crossed the Yaquina River at several points along the route. The train was rolling along at a nice sedate 20mph, going from one curve through another, our steel snake quietly twisting its way to the final destination.

It's been quoted that most Railroads in the early 1900s hired blind surveyors with drunk seeing-eye dogs, and this line was living proof. We covered 70 miles, only to travel 46 “as the crow flies”. We came up on the yellow flag for the 5 mph slow order. It was not hard to see where the lead derailed chip car had climbed the outside rail and continued its destructive path ahead of us. Since this was the first run through here since the derailment, we were both quite nervous and a little apprehensive.

Every MOW person we talked to about this derailment laughed and shook their heads when the shoe-fly was mentioned. I was beginning to wonder if maybe they were right. The amount of ties cut in two was high. Very high - in some places as many as 5 to 10 ties in a row had deep cuts, with most of the older ties missing their ends as they were decapitated completely from the flanges of the wheels rolling on the outside of the rail. It never ceases to amaze me how trains can remain on the rails even in the presence of severe damage to the right-of-way.

Slowly the derailed cars came into view. It did not look good. All eight cars were against the steep cut in the hillside. It was clearly evident that the railroad pushed the cars toward the wall to make room for the shoe-fly. It was also clear why they had done this. The cars had derailed on the hill side of the track, and many had damage from grinding along the open rock wall that existed at this location. Then I saw the shoe-fly. One look from Jeff, my conductor told me that we had just become test monkeys for a dumb idea.

To be continued.